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a giveaway, a tackle, a hug, another four years

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Was it just a hug or something more? And what can we all learn from that most intimate moment filmed for millions to see? Penn State writing teacher Casey Wiley looks for long-term meaning in an emotional moment as he wraps up the fan’s four-year cycle… before it begins again.

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An End To Things

by Casey Wiley

“Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada, pues nada.”
—Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

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I’ve searched online for the 31st minute of the U.S. versus Ghana game, the moment Ricardo Clark is pulled and then held by his coach. I do not know precisely why I was searching, but standing in a bar in Hoboken witnessing the scene live I felt something, and, post-World Cup, I’d like to try to feel it again.

I’m dangling the scene, or maybe the recollection or recreation of the scene. I should have TiVO. I should just have a friend replay the damn thing for me. I should give this up. But I remember it like this: Rico plays defectively, commits an egregious error, is yanked. The unremitting game even stops for his error. Slumping off the field he looks at the least like a boy ready for admonishment. Versus Ghana, Bob Bradley had wanted fresh legs for his dog-tired, only-hope midfield, and he must have had confidence in Rico’s defensive knack; the aim was for Rico to plug the holes in the central defense and allow Michael Bradley, the coach’s son, to attack when necessary.. That is truth, but the following is legend: Rico is one of his boys. Bob Bradley is his son’s father, of course, but he is also Rico’s. They are all his sons.

No, that’s a poor metaphor. But I know that Bob Bradley held him for a long while. What was he holding onto?

So. Am I remembering correctly? Rico touches hands fishly with Mo Edu (who then races onto the field). The dejected midfielder slumps toward the bench, probably seeking blanket or jacket and hood, pining to disappear. But he is embraced by Bradley who wears a puffy down winter coat. I witnessed this in a crowded, steamy Irish bar down the street from a handful of other crowded, steamy Jersey bars; surrounded by hundreds of U.S. supporters, I was very alone, had been driving from friends in Syracuse to JFK to pick up my girlfriend, was engulfed by these warm, damp people, bobbed solo.

I’m getting off track here, but I’ve been off track for a few weeks now ever since the U.S. lost, ever since I fought my way out of the bar into the late afternoon hot sun. Crowded city streets. I bought a damn Quizno’s sub and a watery coffee, deviated into a decaying park a street off Washington and sat on a bench maybe fifty feet away from four women about my age. Gazed towards Manhattan. The women chatted and laughed on about weddings. Eventually I found myself paying the seventeen dollars to get out of a parking garage, recognized myself on this highway going south, that street, some neighborhood on the Island, altogether sort of lost on my way to Queens. I’d like to say I was feeling angry from the game, but that isn’t true. I was feeling guilty. Guilty for following this team so rabidly and tirelessly, for villain-izing Slovenia, Algeria, Ghana, for actually feeling sorry for, making excuses for, the U.S. as team, as country—like we need any of that.

I thought I’d be playing the what-if game post-Ghana, but that all remained tucked away because we simply didn’t deserve to win that game. (Ghana had, what, three chances and capitalized on two of them; Clint, Landon, Bradley, Jozy all resembled tired men; our defense was scattered….)

I don’t know how else to put this but as I drove toward JFK I was feeling most guilty about quite simply loving this group of twenty-three, for giving myself to them, for reading-about-them-listening-to-them-talking-about-them-pondering-and-wondering-about-them; I felt stupid for believing that I knew these players intimately—that being the key word: their on-field tendencies, of course, but more of this: Chuck Davies’ blown curfew and car accident and peeled scalp and wild-fast, then slow recovery and the fit/unfit Twitter junk; Feilhaber’s claim in one mag interview that he’s the best dancer on the team, that Holden (jokingly, I think) just won’t shut up in the locker room; Tim Howard’s (overcoming) Tourette’s; Landon mentioning Bianca on live TV post-Algeria, oh-my-gawd-what’s-going-to-happen to them! I had simply overloaded myself with personal information, most of it useless and unrelated to Men with Ball on Field, and now, Saturday afternoon E.S.T., everything was simply over.

And I wanted to know nothing more.

Chewing that sub in hot, sticky Hoboken—an old lady’s attic in July—young people all over the place one street removed, beer and Saturday, I felt, finally, a sense of relief: this U.S. team—my boys—were simply not that good, and we deserved to lose, and losing is final.

But what is so final about Rico’s hug? Well, then.

Then I tried to forget things for a while.

I admit I haven’t seen the replay of the Hug, but I’ve thought of it more than Gyan’s sweet goal and our central defense scrambling or all those failed chippy, weary crosses late on our offensive end. It’s easy and crowd-ish to say that I do not like Rico, but it’s true. Bob’s son, his true son, the real star, appears uncomfortable playing alongside him of late—he knows that Feilhaber attacks with spunk and skill, that Edu is a more stable defensive presence; with one of these two by his side, Michael B. is able to slide ahead and attack or track back to kill. His abilities are freed. After the early England goal—a Rico plus Gooch flub—Rico simply exists on the field. He is plainly decent, fine; he is: eh. But versus Ghana I was okay with him starting, even defended it to a friend: fresh legs from a game off. He’ll be hungry, I said.

And then there was the giveaway and the yellow and Ricardo Clark was no more. 31st minute, Bob Bradley holds Rico’s head closely. Intimately. Watching from this bar of strangers, believing sort of unconsciously and definitely pompously that I know this American team and this player, I felt like I should have understood precisely what to do at this moment, as if I stood on the sidelines right there in South Africa. But what do I know of creating and holding and teaching? Do I scream, thrust my finger toward the bench? Do I blame myself?

How can I believe to be so intimately close to this team and then withdraw in this ultimate emotional-intimate moment? How can I sneer and boo this kid and turn my back on him? And does any of this mock-concern matter? Simply, what is this strange bond we form with our teams?

Bob Bradley, wearing that puffy, dark winter coat, engulfs the young midfielder; at a glance, the two could be cuddling in a sleeping bag; they could be lightly wrestling. Rico averts his gaze; he cannot look into those eyes, but the bald man does not want to hurt him, and this man, the lines on his face distinct, holds the boy’s head, no, cups his head as he once cupped his newborn son, and he slides to his left so one face holds steady in front of the other—a mirror of sorts; the older man, this father, whispers something, no, declares something—a long something—says this into the boy’s ear. What are the words? To the outside observer the boy is realized suddenly as small, thin as if he had no business existing on that field with those guys. He is pulling away. To what?

Standing in that bar I recall hating most of those people, me included, watched Rico’s giveaway and then the desperate yellow card tackle, and finally his dismissal; we wrote the kid off justlikethat, scratched him out, tossed him to the side like a spitty cigarette butt, but suddenly we saw the Hug. It was a forgiveness to all of us. If Rico could be forgiven on such a lofty stage, surely we could be forgiven too. And then I felt strangely okay about Rico Clark, or about that hug, or about the end of things. The Hug, I realized then or now, is the final gloomy, desperate, heartbreaking, faintly beautiful action that we can hold onto from the U.S.’s run; the rest is anything but silence; it is wild and sweaty and debatable. It is sailed crosses and too-long passes and feeble shots and could-have-beens. It is washy and foggy and steamy, that old lady’s attic.

Pulling Rico early was a desperate, necessary action. Sure, the U.S. still had a good shot to win (and then who knows?), but there was something so hopeless, so freakin’ personal about that coach/player connection that the game mattered strangely less to me after that moment. Maybe I was realizing that I had been wrong about Rico being fine in this game (and I would have taken “fine”). Maybe that dull feeling building in me was the beginning of the relief that I would feel post-game; of course I didn’t know this team on any true personal level; the guys are not friends, they are not enemies; I am merely a distant fan, lulled in by the World Cup and the incessant discussion surrounding it: the Twitter feeds and websites and round-the-clock reporting.

I was wrong about a lot of things. What else am I wrong about?

I cannot say post-hug that I knew we were going to lose, but I can say that my fandom is a complicated lust, a surrender of body and mind, an allowance for these guys and this game to control me. Like a 2-1 defeat, the Hug is an emotional end to things. And I needed that.

But I, and you, and you, you, you, walked away. A few of us maybe held each other—but that’s cheesy and not true. Most of us just drank another beer and cussed out Appiah and our central defense and then looked toward…four years: our youth system and Landon’s and Clint’s ages and a defense.

Don’t get me wrong; I wanted nothing more than to see this U.S. team win, but even now I know that can’t possibly be true, and I feel strangely clean admitting this. Right now I know this team distracted me so beautifully for those weeks; I felt—surely—anguish and elation; the thing bulging and riling in my chest and stomach during the second half versus Algeria was the feeling, I swear (and I duck as I write this), of panic’s dull growth, of receiving spotty news of a friend in a car crash, or maybe something just less than that; and with that late Donovan goal, that feeling—a release, a breath—was the knowledge that that person had walked away from the car’s mangled remains—walked away! I know now that this team is done, and I feel myself, and I am still here. And mostly present. I am near and far, distantly aware of superior soccer having been played in South Africa, while the rest of me teaches and looks for an apartment and eats and tries not to think about soccer.

When asked by a reporter about his implied unfortunate choice to start Robbie Findley and Ricardo Clark, Bob Bradley’s response was plain, boring, just like him: “It is what it is,” he said, shrugging. Maybe the Hug just is what it is; I’m making it out to be big and bold like a giant helium balloon that is nothing more than flimsy material; maybe I should have let this scene go, thought just as much about any other soccer moment, or—how about this—considered anything but soccer; for remembering and replaying must be some sign of support for a team that doesn’t know me from any other dude, and a player—a new villain for us to growl at—who may not see time in another World Cup. But I allowed this game to be pressed to my face for a month, and this hug is finally something true and personal, the sweetest and realest glimpse into the lives of two people on my team. All those magazine interviews and Twitter feeds, the piles of second- and third-hand information, become suddenly foolish.

In my flimsy attempt at dangling the Father/Son metaphor here I had just assumed that we, the fans, the distant ones living everyday lives, would act as father figure here, the ones comforting, the ones forgiving, but might we be the flawed ones, the ones in need of holding?

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Casey Wiley teaches writing at Penn State University – Altoona. He’s working on a book about stand-up comedy, social humor and why he’s not very funny. Read Wiley’s past contribution to the Diary Project about being a soccer fan in an NFL office: Dolphin Days.

Photo found at Match Fit USA.

“Pity comes too late, turn around and face your fate: An eternity of this before your eyes!”

Last Saturday’s draw felt like a win. Yesterday’s felt like a loss, which isn’t to take anything away from the unbelievable comeback orchestrated by the USMNT against Slovenia.

It’s just to say that when, after a wonderful date, a date that would go down as one of the best, a mask removed reveals scars. No matter the beauty underneath, it’s hard to get past the surface.

Blame it on the light. Click HERE for the full story…

this is all five parts of the story.

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Sacha Kljestan throws up his hands. He did his best and doesn’t know what else to do. Maybe it’s time to quit. He’s thought about it before. One guy can only do so much. So many factors go into success or create failure. The opponent is only of them.

Sacha sizes up his pre-teen cousin Moselle, who has her younger brother, Sterling, bouncing and banging up and down as she yanks harder on the back of his underwear. No one seems determined to make her stop. Sacha tries one last time. He’s out of his chair and tugging on her arms, but Moselle only releases a wicked smile and cackling laugh as she jerks harder on the elastic waist band as if the pull chord on a stubborn lawn mower. And Sterling is no help, enjoying the victimization a little too much. His giggling and screaming mixed with the occasional wince in his toothy smile roughly translates to: “What? Wedgies aren’t cool during dinner parties? Look at me!”

“Enough!” Sacha’s aunt, Robin, says with all the defeated charm a mom can muster when she knows her words hold little sway over the popular attention this audience holds for her children. Moselle finally relents. She and her brother scamper off to the family room. Sacha returns to the table. Little kids are curious things.

It’s two nights before Sacha’s fifth MLS season opener, and ten members of his extended family overflow the dining room of his parents’ modest two-story home on a quiet street in Huntington Beach, California. With the skirmish over, attention returns to Sacha. The more alcohol that goes down, the more opinions that come up. None of us can fathom Sterling’s delight in the wedgie, but neither can we make much sense of Sacha’s career. Click HERE for the full story…

This is part 5. Here is part 4. Here is part 3. Here is part 2. Here is part 1.

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Sacha is in line for a spot in the American midfield, but where exactly he stands only Bob Bradley knows. The American coach deals in elusive simplicity, which he projects to the media and, sometimes it turns out, even his players. Sacha didn’t know what Bradley was thinking. He wasn’t sure if he had any chance of going to the World Cup. In November of last year, following the game against Denmark, coach and player sat down one-on-one.

“He is a bit vague sometimes when he speaks to us,” Sacha says about his past, present, and he hopes future coach. “He and I had a pretty long and hard conversation in Denmark. And it was really tough to hear. I don’t want to go into detail about what he told me, but yeah it was tough. And disappointing for sure, and hard, but I guess another doubter, another person who doesn’t believe in you at one given point or time, and you have to change their mind.” Click HERE for the full story…

This is part 4. Here is part 3. Here is part 2. Here is part 1.

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The dream team. Not The Dream Team. The Hulking NBA players walked next to the soccer team at the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Oylmpics, but for an U-23 American soccer team, this was the best yet. Dreaming back to 1996 and his 100-meter hero, Sacha asked Adidas if they could make him gold boots. They gave him silver instead. Hey, U.S. men’s soccer has never won any color medal. “I told them silver would do just fine,” Sacha says.

President Bush addressed all the athletes in a big gymnasium prior to the procession. “I don’t know a lot about sports,” the former owner of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers said. “But go out and win the gold for the USA.” Click HERE for the full story…

This is part 3. Here is part 2. Here is part 1.

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Sacha played every minute of every game his freshman year as an attacking central midfielder. He finished second on the team in points, with 6 assists and 4 goals and was just one of three freshman to earn all-conference honors in the Big East. “I went there thinking I can get a good education because of soccer,” Sacha says. “But after my first month at Seton Hall, I was back to saying I want to play pro again. I was back on track with my original dream.”

If this was basketball or American football, his coaching worries and any self-doubt would be gone for a few years; barring injury he’d be on a linear track to the professional ranks. But for soccer’s most driven, there’s another dream: to play for the national team. Click HERE for the full story…

Sacha Kljestan throws up his hands. He did his best and doesn’t know what else to do. Maybe it’s time to quit. He’s thought about it before. One guy can only do so much. So many factors go into success or create failure. The opponent is only of them.

Sacha sizes up his pre-teen cousin Moselle, who has her younger brother, Sterling, bouncing and banging up and down as she yanks harder on the back of his underwear. No one seems determined to make her stop. Sacha tries one last time. He’s out of his chair and tugging on her arms, but Moselle only releases a wicked smile and cackling laugh as she jerks harder on the elastic waist band as if the pull chord on a stubborn lawn mower. And Sterling is no help, enjoying the victimization a little too much. His giggling and screaming mixed with the occasional wince in his toothy smile roughly translates to: “What? Wedgies aren’t cool during dinner parties? Look at me!”

“Enough!” Sacha’s aunt, Robin, says with all the defeated charm a mom can muster when she knows her words hold little sway over the popular attention this audience holds for her children. Moselle finally relents. She and her brother scamper off to the family room. Sacha returns to the table. Little kids are curious things.

It’s two nights before Sacha’s fifth MLS season opener, and ten members of his extended family overflow the dining room of his parents’ modest two-story home on a quiet street in Huntington Beach, California. With the skirmish over, attention returns to Sacha. The more alcohol that goes down, the more opinions that come up. None of us can fathom Sterling’s delight in the wedgie, but neither can we make much sense of Sacha’s career. Click HERE for the full story…

Filip Bondy’s new book on the USMNT will get better with age

I almost put it down after the forward. In his 300-page book Chasing The Game (out now from De Capa Press), which interlaces player profiles and men’s national team history with expanded game reports from the recently completed World Cup Qualifying cycle, Filip Bondy makes one thing abundantly clear: this book is not for soccer fans.

Instead of the behind-the-scenes narratives or in-the-field reporting that the best non-fiction books bring to sate all potential audiences, Bondy delivers patchwork profiles for only the most popular (and obvious) players and game reports painted over with bits of colorful scene-setting. There’s no sense of narrative or narrator, and for a fan of the game and team (the person you would think this book is written for) there is very little new information, very few new quotes or insights, and absolutely no surprises.

It does do what newspapers do best: write down history in a simple and straightforward way. Bondy has a wonderful USA Today or Sports Illustrated pull-out section to prepare the mainstream American sports audience for the World Cup, but at 300 pages, he has a boring book. At least for a few years. Click HERE for the full story…

Did I just learn why the negotiations over the collective bargaining agreement are so contentious? Did I find out just how disrespected the Vietnam league is? Or did I discover that MLS doesn’t think he’s worth it? There is plenty to learn from the professional path taken by Lee Nguyen, but at present, all I have are questions.

Talking to Nguyen back in November of last year it seemed certain he would be playing in a MLS uniform in 2010. Once high school player of the year and college freshman of the year, as recently as last fall Arsenal had nice things to say about the 23-year-old Texan who played within the national team system at almost every level. He’s spent time at PSV Eindhoven, Randers FC, and HAGL in Vietnam. In an environment where nearly every talented young American player runs from MLS to foreign countries for better competition and compensation, here is a guy who wants to come back home. Done and done, right? So why am I waking him up at 6:45 AM in Vietnam—Lee thankfully awake from the half-day time change and jet lag before his new season starts at the end of the month? Click HERE for the full story…

TIAS’s Senior Hair Band Correspondent scores world exclusive with the Group of Death

If you were one of the lucky few who snagged a t-shirt in Seattle during the Supporters Summit, than you might know the Group of Death. For the rest of you, it’s merely the hardest group, with the toughest teams, pooled together in one group during the World Cup draw–which goes down today at Noon, setting off a full day of wholly unique soccer events in New York…

Which brings us back to the Group of Death–not the group, but the band. The vagabond heavy metal band of soccer loving, hairspray abusing, face painting leather freaks that tours once every four years. Talk to them and it’s, “awesome this,” “melt off that” to the point where the music becomes the least of your problems when trying to glean any sort of information out of them. Or at least that was my experience with the band of misfits-doesn’t-even-get-it-close. The Group of Death. Why they wanted to do an interview with TIAS, I’ll never know. Should I feel proud? Ashamed? Or scared about just how easy it is to find me?

And on Friday, it will be very easy to find me, as it’s one of those great days to live in New York. World Cup draw at the international bar or restaurant of your choice from Noon-3. At 4pm I’ll be at Niketown NY to finish up my first on-camera work during Live With Landon, a streaming event broadcast live on Facebook. Then straight from there to Nevada Smiths for the opening night of GoD’s world tour, which I think is called ‘GoD Help Us’.

Somewhere while sitting down with the four members of the Group of Death, between their music making me self conscious and their juggling causing my ears to bleed, I was able to get in a few questions and three separate confrontations. Click HERE for the full story…